I just had one of my tenants tell me that apartments.com hits them with advertisements for other apartments whenever they log in and via email. Can someone confirm this? I will be livid if this is true and will look for an alternative to collect rent electronically. In fact, does anyone have any recommendations for a free service to collect rent electronically? Thanks for any help you can give, Tom
@Tom Maurer You might like Innago, its quite good. No, they don't advertise other units. Yes, apts does, at least generally if not specific units. Just use a second email to play the role of the tenant and find out.
Thanks for the recommendations Joe and Edgar. Does Zillow advertise other apartments to your tenants?
Zillow only collects. TurboTenant.com is what I use to list my rental properties. Zillow's collection platform is separate from the rental/purchase platform. For your tenants to get listing recommendations, they would have to have a search set. I am not aware of unsolicited advertisements going to my tenants. Even if they did, I take good care of my properties and my rents are reasonable. They aren't going anywhere, and if they did, I would get more rent as the rents have increased.
Listing with TurboTenant, I received 33 people interested in about 2 days. The demand is out there.
Well that's crappy of them. Thanks for the head's up. I use QuickBooks for my bookkeeping. I have recurring invoices set up that automatically go out to each tenant on the 24th of each month for their rent. They can click on it and pay it online or with their phones. Then QuickBooks deposits it into my account within a couple of days. They charge me 1% for that, so I pay $5.20 for each tenant, as their rent is $520. They used to not charge, so when they started that I just worked it into my rent increase for that next year. Tenants also have the option of putting a check in the rent slot or dropping checks/cash right at my bank. Then I just mark it paid in QuickBooks and there's no charge. Most people choose to pay online though.